Perhaps you've seen
some of Sir Carol Reed's movies. His specialty was the post-war spy
fable filled with the corrupt and the corruptable, where most
principles were, shall we say, flexible. His most famous is The Third
Man, which brought Graham Greene's Harry Lime to cinema life as the
most corrupt international schemer of them all. Nearly every
documentary on cinema history features the famous conversation between
Lime and his former college buddy on Vienna's Riesenrad, and Lime's
famous rationalization of his corruption:

"In Italy for
the years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and
bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, da Vinci and the
Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500
years of peace and democracy, and what did that produce? The Cuckoo
Clock!"

Reed made
another brilliant, if lesser known film adaptation of a Graham Greene
novel, called Our Man in Havana. It featured Alec Guinness as a silly
little vacuum cleaner salesman who was offered the riches and prestige
of being the inside intelligence man for the U.K. in Cuba. Unfortunately, he didn't
know anything or have anything worthwhile to sell, so he just made some stuff up.
This worked fine until he saw real lives trapped in the web of lies
which he spun.

D'oh!

NUDITY REPORT

Jamie Lee
Curtis exposes her breasts very briefly when she invites Rush
into her bed.

Jamie Lee's
right nipple is exposed when Brosnan holds her from behind

Catherine
McCormack's breast are seen in a very lively sex scene with
Brosnan.

Our Man in
Havana was a terrific film, balancing ironic comedy with intrigue and
moral integrity, and it features many of the great Brit character
actors like Noel Coward and Ralph Richardson as well as such unusual
foils as Burl Ives and Ernie Kovacs.

The Tailor of Panama
movie is based upon precisely the same premise, but with layers of
additional cynicism heaped upon it. The vacuum cleaner man is now a
tailor with excessive debts and dark secrets in his past. He wants the
money and he doesn't want his wife to know the secrets, so he goes
along with the seedy MI-6 agent who approaches him. He agrees to
supply info about the future of the canal. He doesn't really
know anything worthwhile
from his tailoring conversations, so he tries to get info by examining
his wife's documents (she works for the president). Finding this
equally fruitless, he simply decides to tell the intelligence
community what they want to hear.

The corrupt MI-6
agent, played to sleazy perfection by Pierce Brosnan, doesn't really
care whether the information is good or bad, just how much of a career
boost or a financial profit he can make from it. Up and down the line,
nobody in the military and intelligence communities has any concern
for the accuracy of their information. Even the guys who aren't in it
for personal gain don't want the real stuff. They want the stuff that
supports their ideology.

The fictional details are
interwound with real stories just as cynical, in order to support the
film's cold eye. For example, CIA director George Bush built up Noreiga as the
savior of the canal, a miscalculation so gross that President George
Bush later had to invade the damned country to prevent his
"savior" from becoming the drug kingpin of the hemisphere.
The film effectively shows that Noreiga's claim to the throne was no
more or less credible than that of the tottering drunk our poor tailor casts
in the role! And like Bush with Noriega, the intelligence officers
swear that the drunken stumblebum is their best bet, and is cast of
truly presidential timbre, just the guy to keep the current Panamanian
administration from selling the canal to the Chinese (another of the
tailor's fantasies).

So the tailor's simple
lies lead to some real trouble for his innocent friends, and for the
world, because the paranoia in the Pentagon about the future of the
canal is enough to justify a military invasion when they think that
their latest savior has been taken out by government death squads!

It's very funny in a
Dr. Strangelove way, and it's just as clever an international thriller
as anyone has made since ... well, since the cold war was still with
us, and this stuff was actually important! The story is by John le
Carre, the film is directed by the legendary John Boorman (Excalibur,
Deliverance), Geoffrey Rush fills in nicely for Alec Guinness, Brosnan is
deliciously slimy, and the ending is exactly what I hoped for.

IMDb
guideline: 7.5 usually indicates a level of
excellence, about like three and a half stars
from the critics. 6.0 usually indicates lukewarm
watchability, about like two and a half stars
from the critics. The fives are generally not
worthwhile unless they are really your kind of
material, about like two stars from the critics.
Films under five are generally awful even if you
like that kind of film, equivalent to about one
and a half stars from the critics or less,
depending on just how far below five the rating
is.

My own
guideline: A means the movie is so good it
will appeal to you even if you hate the genre. B means the movie is not
good enough to win you over if you hate the
genre, but is good enough to do so if you have an
open mind about this type of film. C means it will only
appeal to genre addicts, and has no crossover
appeal. D means you'll hate it even if you
like the genre. E means that you'll hate it even if
you love the genre. F means that the film is not only
unappealing across-the-board, but technically
inept as well.

Based on this
description, this
film is a B. A delight for espionage lovers, coming after many
dry years. Also entertaining enough for non-genre fans.